A Comparison between Various Software Cost Estimation Models

Effective cost estimation is one of the most important and complex tasks in development of any software project. The stakeholders require a simple and effective model to enable them to make an efficient estimate of the software development cost. Estimation, basically, means to predict the value and predictions tend to go wrong. The whole process requires a huge amount of data, which is often challenging to collect, hence, making the whole process challenging. In this paper, we try to illustrate various existing cost estimation models proposed over the years and finally present a comparison between them. The paper also tries to pinpoint the various reasons for errors in cost estimation. Keyword: COCOMO, SLOC, Function Points, Fuzzy, Neural Net.